Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead

Published: July 21, 2002

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An American military official interviewed about Niazi Qala did not deny that civilians were killed there, but he insisted that the village had been a base for Taliban and Qaeda fighters. "This compound was in use by Taliban and Al Qaeda senior leadership," he said. The official did not name who those senior officials might have been.

Hajji Saifullah, the leader of the Gardez ruling council, said the Americans had relied on faulty intelligence provided by a local warlord, Padsha Khan Zadran.

Mr. Zadran, who was then vying to become governor of the area, told the Americans to strike the town in order to eliminate a village that had refused to support him, Mr. Saifullah said.

"The Americans got it completely wrong," Mr. Saifullah said in an interview. "Those people were not Al Qaeda. The Americans are listening to the wrong people."

One of the most deadly of the questionable American raids came when Mr. Zadran apparently used his influence with the Americans to call in a strike on his political foes.

On Dec. 20, according to rival Afghan commanders in Gardez, Mr. Zadran ordered fighters at a checkpoint south of the city to halt a convoy of tribal elders from Khost who were heading to Kabul for the inauguration of the new interim government. They demanded that the elders pressure Mr. Karzai to appoint Mr. Zadran the governor of Paktia, Paktika and Khost Provinces. The elders, Afghans in Gardez say, refused.

A few hours later, the convoy of elders was hit by a succession of American attacks, which killed most of the occupants. The survivors scrambled up a hill, toward the villages of Asmani and Pokharai, and the American planes, circling back, struck both villages, destroying about 20 homes.

Rival warlords in Gardez say Mr. Zadran used his satellite phone to tell the Americans that the convoy was filled with Qaeda fighters.

The Afghans insist, however, that the elders in the convoy supported Mr. Karzai's government.

A few weeks after the strike, two men from a nearby village who were found sifting through the rubble of Asmani for their relatives' belongings said they had buried 42 villagers after the strike.

The men were adamant that there had never been any Qaeda or Taliban fugitives there.

"I swear it, I collected all the bodies, and every one was a villager, somebody I knew," said Hajji Khial Khan, one of the men.

A senior American military commander said that both the convoy and the villages were valid military targets filled with enemy forces, and that several senior Taliban leaders were killed or wounded.

At Asmani, Akal Khan Kharakhel, one of the men rummaging through the ruins, was asked what lesson the Americans might draw from what happened. He did not hesitate.

"The Americans' big mistake," he said, "was to give satellite telephones to a man who has only one interest, and not the same one as the Americans."

John F. Burns and Carlotta Gall contributed to this article from Afghanistan.